


Lament

by greendragon_templar



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Historical Hetalia, Homesickness, World War 1, does 500 words even merit that tag?? lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 16:26:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17707688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greendragon_templar/pseuds/greendragon_templar
Summary: Her reality's no substitute for the dream left behind.





	Lament

War rooms and tents can be built for more than tense discussions and rows, the unhappy acquiescence of old men who don’t want to be – and shouldn’t be – in charge of any one other than themselves; more can be accomplished within their confines than spoken grievances, statements twice given and thrice regretted. Tents in a field are nothing special. The only difference from one tent to the other is the party inside it. People ought to know her well enough by now, besides, to understand that the boundaries and unspoken limitations so erected by men have no bearing on her at all. Tents and required permissions have no value when she’s not in the mood to know they exist.

New Zealand recalls a dozen remarkable and unremarkable things that have happened to her in and around the tents. She’s swigged from flasks stashed in her apron and been the first on the scene on the many, now regular occasions that either an officer or common soldier’s collapsed at the entrance after thirty-six hours without sleep. She’s saluted and run and walked and ferried drugs from one amputee to another. She’s sat with the other nurses and arranged flowers, when the opportunity presented itself, and stolen kisses behind the tents’ folds, gained marks and kisses that have burned from where they’d been hidden beneath layers of starched purity.

Today in one of the tents, it’s all maps of Europe and unread and crumpled telegrams, but she catches a glimpse of something more global, slid under the rest. New Zealand imagines the path back home once she’s pulled the crinkled thing free of all the layers on top of it, not needing to use her finger to determine the path she took to get here. For once, then, she’s thinking for _herself_ of all the innumerable routes to the home she left behind, where she would go if it was up to her, rather than hearing for the umpteenth time of Cook’s voyages and the havoc wreaked along the way, the permanent scars and ordeals that England saw fit to place on her shoulders the moment _he_ (not her) deemed right.

Her coastline is far prettier in person, and there’s that silent scream within, a shriek for more, a pining that begins in the heart and ends somewhere in her brain because she cannot dive into the Sounds from here, she can’t relive what a summer is meant to feel like. There’s blood in the creases of her hands from an earlier shift and flakes of it decorate the paper when she drags her hands across.

She’ll look at it and sigh, seeing the two islands that even cartographers forget, and she wishes she had the gall to rip it right off the map and shove it in the face of every Englishman who has dared call her Australian – worse, one of England’s own.

A war room or tent can be built for far more than discussions and quarrels alone, and now, it stifles her sobs.


End file.
